GARDEN LEAVE

Okay bye then. To be fair, the email did use phrases like ‘take this opportunity to thank’ and ‘sorry to see him go’. Hmm. Thankfully, end of the week is official speak for ‘basically today’ - which I am interpreting as now.

So. At 11:30, I closed my laptop and wrapped up my headphones. This is the second job I’ve left not on my own terms. The first was a disastrous failure to support me through probation, and I had been let go after not having much clue how to do the job.

That wasn’t the case this time. This time I built the road, the process, the highway for a whole organisation to work on documentation together. This time I took hold of what I was doing and made it my own, so successfully it turns out, that I wasn’t needed in the end. But, as I pointed out in my final chat with Neil, it had been a significant leap in my career, and I made sure I thanked them for that.

And now? Now I’m on gardening leave. Which is great, except this is the one time in my life when I don’t have a garden. I think the idea is that I log out of work while they disable my access to all the stuff they consider important. I get exiled to the garden - which, actually is quite a pleasant thought.

Fair enough. I could be grumpily adding German insults to the translation files, or mud-slinging in a corner of the docs where it would take months to find. I could be spreading dissent among my colleagues or wailing about the injustice of it all on Teams.

I’m not, of course. I did get some nice messages from colleagues though. They were sorry to see me go and said I’d been a pleasure to work with. I sent a message round about how work had always only ever been about people, and about how much I’d enjoyed chatting about Croatia, or guitars, or British culture. The subtext was of course, that people are more important than stuff - one of my long-term sayings. True though, no matter what managers try to tell you.

So what next in the garden? Well the first thing I did was go out for a walk and a celebratory coffee. I’ve got a few projects to work on, but my main goal is probably going to have to be figuring out what’s next. Do I want to be a technical author? Do I want to do contract work for a bit? Do I want to focus more on content design? Perhaps I can write that book I’ve been pondering for years?

I have a few deeper things to think through, and at least a few weeks to breathe. I have a feeling that in the long run, God has given me a truly wonderful gift in this short season, and I don’t want to miss out on it. I think there’s a lot of joy out here in the garden.